Still It Accurately Expresses Arab Sentiment. [FN#29] I Wish That The Clever Orientalist Who Writes In The Saturday Review Would Not Translate “Al-Layl,” By Lenes Sub Nocte Susurri:

The Arab bard alluded to no such effeminacies. [FN#30] The subject of “Dakhl” has been thoroughly exhausted by Burckhardt and Layard.

It only remains to be said that the Turks, through ignorance of the custom, have in some cases made themselves contemptible by claiming the protection of women. [FN#31] It is by no means intended to push this comparison of the Arab’s with the Hibernian’s poetry. The former has an intensity which prevents our feeling that “there are too many flowers for the fruit”; the latter is too often a mere blaze of words, which dazzle and startle, but which, decomposed by reflection, are found to mean nothing. Witness

“The diamond turrets of Shadukiam, And the fragrant bowers of Amberabad!”

[FN#32] I am informed that the Benu Kahtan still improvise, but I never heard them. The traveller in Arabia will always be told that some remote clan still produces mighty bards, and uses in conversation the terminal vowels of the classic tongue, but he will not believe these assertions till personally convinced of their truth. The Badawi dialect, however, though debased, is still, as of yore, purer than the language of the citizens. During the days when philology was a passion in the East, those Stephens and Johnsons of Semitic lore, Firuzabadi and Al-Zamakhshari, wandered from tribe to tribe and from tent to tent, collecting words and elucidating disputed significations.

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